I've finally taken the plunge and got a Thinkpad (T480S) and tried out Linux Mint on it for fun. For the past few days I've been playing with Cinnamon and Mate. I started off with Cinnamon, but my laptop performed really poorly under it for reasons I was never able to figure out. Mate performs much better, although:

- Bluetooth audio just won't work (and I can't figure out how to get it working)
- Scaling options are less in depth than Cinnamon.

I'd much prefer Cinnamon but it just won't run.

CPU: Intel i7-8650U (u) @ 4.200GHz
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620
Memory: 799 MiB / 7686 MiB

Anyone have any suggestions? The Bluetooth problem is a work in progress, but I'm curious if anyone knows why Cinnamon is so slow, and if I can fix that.
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Re: First Time Using Linux (Mint) Issues Arise
By: Foriest Jan Smith to All on Fri Jan 02 2026 17:51:57

Memory: 799 MiB / 7686 MiB

Not familiar with this nomenclature. How many gigs is this?

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Hey Mortar!

On Fri, Jan 02 2026 21:09:15 -0600, you wrote:

Memory: 799 MiB / 7686 MiB

Not familiar with this nomenclature. How many gigs is this?

Looks to me like 8gb of ram, with only about 1gb being used. So that doesn't seem to be the issue, unless Cinnamon now requires more than that.

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm, because beating people up is illegal.
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Hey Foriest Jan!

On Fri, Jan 02 2026 16:51:57 -0600, you wrote:

I'd much prefer Cinnamon but it just won't run.

CPU: Intel i7-8650U (u) @ 4.200GHz GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620
Memory: 799 MiB / 7686 MiB

Anyone have any suggestions? The Bluetooth problem is a work in
progress, but I'm curious if anyone knows why Cinnamon is so slow,
and if I can fix that.

I would tend to think it would be your GPU and/or drivers that were chosen during install, as the hardware itself seems like it should handle that OS just fine (unless Cinnamon got completely bloated since the last time I looked at it).

Are you using the open source intel drivers? Did you have any options regarding this during install? There may be other driver options, including closed source, that you can try.

I also did a quick duckduckgo search, and it actually came up with quite a few results of others having the same issues, so maybe the graphics driver is not the answer. Try searching "linux mint cinnamon slow Intel UHD Graphics 620" and see if you can find anything similar to the issues you're having, and if there is a fix for it.

As for bluetooth, take a look here if you haven't already:

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/bluetooth.html

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm, because beating people up is illegal.
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Re: First Time Using Linux (Mint) Issues Arise
By: Mortar to Foriest Jan Smith on Fri Jan 02 2026 09:09 pm

Memory: 799 MiB / 7686 MiB

Not familiar with this nomenclature. How many gigs is this?

Looks like about 7.5 gigs? (8192 would be a full 8 gigs)

MiB is something I've started to notice, maybe in the last 10-15 years or so (?) - It's short for "mebibyte". I've read that's technically the correct term for a unit of 1024 kilobytes (and technically, "megabyte" would refer to 1000 kilobytes). It seems odd to me though, because in the past, "megabyte" was used to refer to 1024 kilobytes (and I've seen that nomenclature used by Microsoft in their operating systems). I've seen some people suggest that Microsoft was wrong in using that terminology, but I'm not sure.

This is one page from Lenovo explaining "mebibyte" vs. "megabyte":

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/mebibyte/index.html

Nightfox

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